1) That there is objective right and wrong, 2) That, as a matter of objective right, absolute, unqualified control of physical entities as property is a right, 3) The existence of intellectual property rights, by limiting the absolute, unqualified control of physical property that holders of rights in physical property have, violates the rights established in #2, and therefore must, therefore, fail given 2.
#1 I'll grant, for now. #2, OTOH, I just can't accept as a statement of moral truth, or even coherent. While certainly some degree of proprietary interest in tangible property is desirable, I would see its value as instrumental, not fundamental, and its scope as limited. But whatever moral right there is to tangible property cannot be absolute if it exists in more than one person (with respect to different physical objects) since physical objects can be used in ways which interfere with other's rights of control, and thus the existence of such an absolute right over one object in one person contradicts the existence of a similarly absolute right over another object in another person, and thus physical property contradicts itself in exactly the same way you claim that intellectual property contradicts physical property.
Of course, if you revise your conception of physical property to be coherent by acknowledging that it need not be absolute, and that constraints can morally exist on what a property holder may do with his property, then you no longer have the problem of intellectual property contradicting physical property.
The most common use, IME, when referring to media content, is the "unlike to offend, irritate, provoke strong emotion, etc." one that relates to appearance. The most common definition overall (and the one that is probably #1 in most dictionaries, consequently) is "harmless". Context matters to communication.
"Code" as some abstract universal entity does not exist to be owned. There are only instantiations of it, copies of it, and only those can be owned. There is no such thing as intellectual property.
You act as if ownership is a physical characteristicts that attaches only to physical entities. This is incorrect. It is a social construct that applies to whatever society decides it applies to. Intellectual property is no less real than any other form of property, whether tangible personal property, other intangible personal property, real property, or whatever.
Anyone who says intellectual property doesn't exist doesn't understand what "property" is.
Now, one can rationally argue that intellectual property shouldn't exist; that it is an undesirable social construct whereas at least some of the other existing forms of property are desirable social constructs. But all ownership is socially constructed, not natural or physical, and ownership of the privileges attached to copyrights is of no different character than ownership of the privileges attached to tangible personal property.
It's mostly just people who like the GNU software base but don't understand what freedom actually means.
People need to distinguish between "disagreeing" and "not understanding". Its perfectly possible to understand the FSF position on software freedom and disagree with their idea of what freedom means either at the high level (Four Freedoms) or the low level (the details of the GPL, etc., by which the FSF seeks to advance the Four Freedoms).
Now I finally realize that MS Shared Source is good enough.
How so? MS Shared Source is, best I know, less likely than the GPL (much less BSD or public domain) to give any third-party developer the freedom to use code to incorporate into a final product under licensing terms that meet the customers need.
If this were the case, nothing could stop me from taking copies of GPL'ed code from a third party, and then simply distribute closed binaries, claiming, as you say, that I am not the one having made the copies.
You can distribute just binaries without any of the obligations under the GPL, if you receive physical copies from some third party, and are only redistributing those physical copies. You can't make copies, and you can't license them under any terms at all, closed or otherwise, (because you don't have any rights that can be licensed, just the right to dispose of copies under the doctrine of first use.)
Incorporating a physical module containing GPL software into a locked-down device is very different (under the GPL) then compiling GPL software and attempting to distribute under a closed license. The person bound by the GPL (the person who supplied the physical module, presumably, or possibly there upstream distributor, depending on who actually made a copy or derivative work that subjected them to the GPL) is of course obliged to provide source and otherwise abide by the GPL, but you aren't subject to the GPL at all, since you aren't doing anything that requires a copyright license in the first place.
(Of course, this would only be true where the doctrine of first sale applies, which is certainly the case in the US, and this isn't legal advice, etc., etc., etc.)
I don't expect them to shop around and notice that most places sell Office but a few actually sell the individual components.
Last I was looking for a computer, plenty of computers at retail came with a Word-only license (and a non-commercial Office trial) bundled, but Microsoft's tactics for pushing software by bundling with computers does change from time to time and I haven't really checked recently, so that might be a real issue. If they are still bundling Word, less so.
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release.
Yeah, cool, 1 in 20 of the people identified as "terrorists" by this program will not even have created the content which led to their identification as terrorists.
Of course, the linking "creating particular content" to actually being a terrorist is a much harder problem than identifying the creators of "anonymous" internet content, so the actual overall system error rate is goign to be much higher than just that 1 in 20.
What he means is Word is often the only part of Office people at home use.
That doesn't make sense with what he said, since he said the cost of the Professional version of Office was the effective cost of Word to the home user. Word is available separately (heck, its often pre-installed separately) at a lower price, and Office Home and Student is available for significantly less than $400 and includes Word.
(Personally, plenty of people I know use Excel and OneNote at home; PowerPoint less so.)
No, you broke it for me. I use a wide variety of Windows applications, and quite a lot of them use different UI designs. The advantage of OpenOffice.org has compared to Office 2007 is not that it works like everything else on Windows, its that it works, specifically, very much like Office 2003 and previous.
It's fine if you're a developer, but what if you're a developer's customer?
If you're a developer's customer, you express a preference (backed with dollars) to acquire software (and associated support, etc.) from developers who will give it to you under terms that best fit your needs, whether that's BSD-like terms, GPL-like terms, or other terms entirely. The BSD license (or, a fortiori, public domain) upstream gives whatever developer you deal with the freedom to meet your needs in this area; the GPL may or may not.
Linus wants to make software that is Free. Stallman wants to make other people make software that is Free, and thinks that the best way to do that is to monkey around with licensing conditions.
But I think what Linus (and others like him) do is at least as important to Free Software as what Stallman does at this point. While people (myself included) will debate endlessly on Slashdot and other forums about the effects of minute details of the latest GPL version, differences between different FLOSS licenses, etc., the fact is that there are successful and durable free software products under every licensing arrangment that can be counted as free (including public domain). What seems to matter most is whether the software is of high quality, fills a need, and excites potential developers: if you have that, with any free terms, you'll get more people involved, whether your product is public domain, BSD, GPLv2, GPLv3, or whatever other license.
What makes Slashdot, Slashdot is different than what makes business, business. People looking to make a buck (who RMS isn't the least bit interested in) aren't interested in ideologies that make it more difficult for them to do so.
If, as you say, RMS isn't "the least bit interested in" people looking to make a buck, why does the GPLv3 bow to needs of B2B vendors and exempt business-oriented products from the anti-TiVoization clause which is supposedly so critical to protecting software freedom?
You cannot distribute the code with a device that will not accept modified versions of that code to run on it.
Yes, you can, and there is nothing the GPLv3, as a non-contract copyright license could do to stop you from doing so. You can't make copies and then distribute them with such a device, but nothing stops you from incorporating such copies that you receive from some third party into such a device.
OTOH, the GPLv3 aims to prevent such distribution (at leat for consumer products, apparently businesses have greater rights than consumers in what features they are allowed to seek in products incorporating GPL software)—which is a restriction on use—as far as is possible without becoming an EULA-style contract rather than a gratuitous license, and when it fails (as it inevitably will since it has a gaping hole) to stop that kind of distribution, the FSF is going to have to decide whether restricting the set of features available in consumer products is more important than Freedom Zero.
GPL3 does not change the spirit of GPL2 one iota. On the contrary, it closes the TiVo-isation loophole that allows certain distributors to nominally comply with the GPL2, while at the same time violating its spirit with impunity: "here is the source, you just can't change it and run it. Look, but don't touch."
If you are given the source, then you can change it and run it. You may not be able to do so on the particular hardware instance you received, but then I can change the code on any particular piece of read-only media and use that media to run the modified code, either. It would be more consistent with the spirit of the GPL pre-v3 to simply require that any hardware product incorporating GPL code have an open specification licensed on GPL-like terms (the precise terms for a hardware-specification license would have to be developed, of course) that allowed re-implementation of the hardware; requiring that hardware incorporating GPL software allow that software to be replaced is analogous to requiring that GPL software in binary form only be redistributed in dynamically-linked versions, not statically-linked versions, and does no more to promote (and as much to restrict) software freedom. And, of course, doing it selectively for only certain kinds of products advances no coherent ideology whatsoever.
The Hurd is slow in coming due to the extreme lack of developers. There's what? 17 registered developers on Savannah? Compared to how many Linux kernel hackers out there?
And it lacks developers, while Linux has plenty, why?
A hypervisor is needless technical complexity in the implementation, just separate out the legal entity that supplies the hardware module with the GPL software from the legal entity which incorporates that hardware module into a device that, as a whole, is locked down even though the individual module isn't. The latter entity does nothing that requires a copyright license to the GPL software, and thus is never restricted by the GPL; the former entity never distributes locked-down hardware, and so doesn't run afoul of the anti-TiVoization rules.
Even after all these years people eagerly line up to get screwed by Microsoft, so it's highly unlikely that something as tame as GPL v 3 is going to bring about a mass exodus from Linux.
That people who don't care about license terms are lining up to get screwed by Microsoft is not grounds for confidence that people who do care about license terms—like people who currently actively chose Linux—might not care enough about the GPLv3 to look for a less burdensome license if Linux were to be offered under the GPLv3 exclusively.
That's not to say there might not be other valid bases for that conclusion, though.
First of all, I'm a little disturbed to see the name "GPLv4" spelled out in writing without any form of sarcasm attached.
Why? Do you expect that the v3 is the end of time for the GPL?
Next, making the GPL use-affecting like a EULA (essentially a contract) is absurd, as that infringes on Freedom number zero, the right to use software as one wishes.
First, there is no "essentially" there, it would have to be a contract. Second, of course it would infringe on Freedom Zero. Whether that's "absurd" or not is subjective, of course, I wasn't arguing that it would be reasonable or desirable for the FSF to do, but that it would be necessary if they were serious about fighting TiVo-ization.
When we speak of using GPL software, we assume that the user or company is receiving the software under the terms of the GPL and not another license or contract. It is not a flaw in the GPL that it can be bypassed by the copyright holder's permission.
There is no reason that the "actual provider" of the GPL-software-containing modules in the scenario I propose has to be the copyright holder of the software, the only thing that is required is that (1) the modules they supply are not "locked down", and (2) they are incorporated by the recipient into a hardware product that verifies that is locked down. The key to circumventing the anti-TiVoization provision isn't that the software module vendor is the copyright holder of the GPL software contained in the module, it is that the hardware vendor that is buying the software module never does anything with the modules that would require a copyright license, and thus is never subject to the GPL.
There is no denying that MS Office is the right tool for many jobs.
Mostly, I think Office is a good enough tool for many jobs. Many, perhaps most, of those jobs have better narrowly-specialized (and, for the commercial alternatives, often far more expensive than Office, though in some cases there are good Free choices) tools available, but if you don't spend enough time on any one of the jobs, you are better off using a good-enough common tool rather than trying to learn and transition between the specialized tools for each.
(This is largely true of the whole idea of an "office suite" application, not really specific to MS Office.)
Then this is the price of a word processor for home users.
Er, no, its not. First of all, Microsoft Office is more than just Word which is available separately; the price of Word alone, or of non-commercial Office licenses, is substantially less than the cost of commercial Office licenses.
The limitations on bundled versions generally make them less than usable
I'm not sure what you mean by "bundled versions"; in one sense, all Microsoft Office versions, as opposed to separate applications, are "bundled versions". But the "restrictions" on, say, Microsoft Office Home and Student are that it has a no-commercial-use license, and it doesn't include Access or Publisher or some other things that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are quite usable without. It also does include OneNote 2007, which only the really expensive commercial Office bundles do, and comes with a 5-seat license. For home users, it would seem eminently usable.
and no one is going to buy a volume discount for their family are they?
Almost everyone I know that uses Microsoft Office at home, whether 2003 or 2007, uses the Student and Teacher (2003) or Home and Student (2007) non-commercial 5-seat version.
You are better at reading minds than I am. 2007's interface left me flat.
Certainly, interface preferences are to a degree subjective and vary from person to person, but I don't think mind-reading is involved in using the Office 2007 interface.
Apple wanted to pay the equivalent of the parking fares for the next 5 years. However, the city makes way more money from parking tickets than from parking meters.
If available parking is reduced, people are more likely to park in no parking zones (which is what the spots would be turned into, right?) and presumably the fines for that are higher than the fines for overstaying a meter, so its win-win (for Apple and the city government, not for people looking for legal parking spaces.)
Python and Ruby also share their deep roots in clean object orientation
I like both Python and Ruby, but is this really true, and if so, what is meant by "clean object orientation" such that Python's roots (i.e., Python pre-"new-style" classes) featured it?
I don't tend to use word processors, so this is an honest question. What's the difference between styles and templates?
A template is, essentially, a file containing a collection of styles that may also include pre-set formatting that is beyond the scope of styles (page formatting, etc.).
Yeah, all those companies with thousands of employees should force them to use a bizarre interface that has no relation to the line of products they've been using for a decade, because *you* find it easier.
Please point to where I said that "all those companies" should switch to Office 2007, or that any company should switch to Office 2007 because I find it more intuitive.
Or are you just fond of arguing with your own imagination?
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to take the position:
1) That there is objective right and wrong,
2) That, as a matter of objective right, absolute, unqualified control of physical entities as property is a right,
3) The existence of intellectual property rights, by limiting the absolute, unqualified control of physical property that holders of rights in physical property have, violates the rights established in #2, and therefore must, therefore, fail given 2.
#1 I'll grant, for now.
#2, OTOH, I just can't accept as a statement of moral truth, or even coherent. While certainly some degree of proprietary interest in tangible property is desirable, I would see its value as instrumental, not fundamental, and its scope as limited. But whatever moral right there is to tangible property cannot be absolute if it exists in more than one person (with respect to different physical objects) since physical objects can be used in ways which interfere with other's rights of control, and thus the existence of such an absolute right over one object in one person contradicts the existence of a similarly absolute right over another object in another person, and thus physical property contradicts itself in exactly the same way you claim that intellectual property contradicts physical property.
Of course, if you revise your conception of physical property to be coherent by acknowledging that it need not be absolute, and that constraints can morally exist on what a property holder may do with his property, then you no longer have the problem of intellectual property contradicting physical property.
The most common use, IME, when referring to media content, is the "unlike to offend, irritate, provoke strong emotion, etc." one that relates to appearance. The most common definition overall (and the one that is probably #1 in most dictionaries, consequently) is "harmless". Context matters to communication.
You act as if ownership is a physical characteristicts that attaches only to physical entities. This is incorrect. It is a social construct that applies to whatever society decides it applies to. Intellectual property is no less real than any other form of property, whether tangible personal property, other intangible personal property, real property, or whatever.
Anyone who says intellectual property doesn't exist doesn't understand what "property" is.
Now, one can rationally argue that intellectual property shouldn't exist; that it is an undesirable social construct whereas at least some of the other existing forms of property are desirable social constructs. But all ownership is socially constructed, not natural or physical, and ownership of the privileges attached to copyrights is of no different character than ownership of the privileges attached to tangible personal property.
People need to distinguish between "disagreeing" and "not understanding". Its perfectly possible to understand the FSF position on software freedom and disagree with their idea of what freedom means either at the high level (Four Freedoms) or the low level (the details of the GPL, etc., by which the FSF seeks to advance the Four Freedoms).
How so? MS Shared Source is, best I know, less likely than the GPL (much less BSD or public domain) to give any third-party developer the freedom to use code to incorporate into a final product under licensing terms that meet the customers need.
You can distribute just binaries without any of the obligations under the GPL, if you receive physical copies from some third party, and are only redistributing those physical copies. You can't make copies, and you can't license them under any terms at all, closed or otherwise, (because you don't have any rights that can be licensed, just the right to dispose of copies under the doctrine of first use.)
Incorporating a physical module containing GPL software into a locked-down device is very different (under the GPL) then compiling GPL software and attempting to distribute under a closed license. The person bound by the GPL (the person who supplied the physical module, presumably, or possibly there upstream distributor, depending on who actually made a copy or derivative work that subjected them to the GPL) is of course obliged to provide source and otherwise abide by the GPL, but you aren't subject to the GPL at all, since you aren't doing anything that requires a copyright license in the first place.
(Of course, this would only be true where the doctrine of first sale applies, which is certainly the case in the US, and this isn't legal advice, etc., etc., etc.)
Last I was looking for a computer, plenty of computers at retail came with a Word-only license (and a non-commercial Office trial) bundled, but Microsoft's tactics for pushing software by bundling with computers does change from time to time and I haven't really checked recently, so that might be a real issue. If they are still bundling Word, less so.
Yeah, cool, 1 in 20 of the people identified as "terrorists" by this program will not even have created the content which led to their identification as terrorists.
Of course, the linking "creating particular content" to actually being a terrorist is a much harder problem than identifying the creators of "anonymous" internet content, so the actual overall system error rate is goign to be much higher than just that 1 in 20.
That doesn't make sense with what he said, since he said the cost of the Professional version of Office was the effective cost of Word to the home user. Word is available separately (heck, its often pre-installed separately) at a lower price, and Office Home and Student is available for significantly less than $400 and includes Word.
(Personally, plenty of people I know use Excel and OneNote at home; PowerPoint less so.)
No, you broke it for me. I use a wide variety of Windows applications, and quite a lot of them use different UI designs. The advantage of OpenOffice.org has compared to Office 2007 is not that it works like everything else on Windows, its that it works, specifically, very much like Office 2003 and previous.
If you're a developer's customer, you express a preference (backed with dollars) to acquire software (and associated support, etc.) from developers who will give it to you under terms that best fit your needs, whether that's BSD-like terms, GPL-like terms, or other terms entirely. The BSD license (or, a fortiori, public domain) upstream gives whatever developer you deal with the freedom to meet your needs in this area; the GPL may or may not.
Linus wants to make software that is Free.
Stallman wants to make other people make software that is Free, and thinks that the best way to do that is to monkey around with licensing conditions.
But I think what Linus (and others like him) do is at least as important to Free Software as what Stallman does at this point. While people (myself included) will debate endlessly on Slashdot and other forums about the effects of minute details of the latest GPL version, differences between different FLOSS licenses, etc., the fact is that there are successful and durable free software products under every licensing arrangment that can be counted as free (including public domain). What seems to matter most is whether the software is of high quality, fills a need, and excites potential developers: if you have that, with any free terms, you'll get more people involved, whether your product is public domain, BSD, GPLv2, GPLv3, or whatever other license.
If, as you say, RMS isn't "the least bit interested in" people looking to make a buck, why does the GPLv3 bow to needs of B2B vendors and exempt business-oriented products from the anti-TiVoization clause which is supposedly so critical to protecting software freedom?
Yes, you can, and there is nothing the GPLv3, as a non-contract copyright license could do to stop you from doing so. You can't make copies and then distribute them with such a device, but nothing stops you from incorporating such copies that you receive from some third party into such a device.
OTOH, the GPLv3 aims to prevent such distribution (at leat for consumer products, apparently businesses have greater rights than consumers in what features they are allowed to seek in products incorporating GPL software)—which is a restriction on use—as far as is possible without becoming an EULA-style contract rather than a gratuitous license, and when it fails (as it inevitably will since it has a gaping hole) to stop that kind of distribution, the FSF is going to have to decide whether restricting the set of features available in consumer products is more important than Freedom Zero.
If you are given the source, then you can change it and run it. You may not be able to do so on the particular hardware instance you received, but then I can change the code on any particular piece of read-only media and use that media to run the modified code, either. It would be more consistent with the spirit of the GPL pre-v3 to simply require that any hardware product incorporating GPL code have an open specification licensed on GPL-like terms (the precise terms for a hardware-specification license would have to be developed, of course) that allowed re-implementation of the hardware; requiring that hardware incorporating GPL software allow that software to be replaced is analogous to requiring that GPL software in binary form only be redistributed in dynamically-linked versions, not statically-linked versions, and does no more to promote (and as much to restrict) software freedom. And, of course, doing it selectively for only certain kinds of products advances no coherent ideology whatsoever.
And it lacks developers, while Linux has plenty, why?
A hypervisor is needless technical complexity in the implementation, just separate out the legal entity that supplies the hardware module with the GPL software from the legal entity which incorporates that hardware module into a device that, as a whole, is locked down even though the individual module isn't. The latter entity does nothing that requires a copyright license to the GPL software, and thus is never restricted by the GPL; the former entity never distributes locked-down hardware, and so doesn't run afoul of the anti-TiVoization rules.
That people who don't care about license terms are lining up to get screwed by Microsoft is not grounds for confidence that people who do care about license terms—like people who currently actively chose Linux—might not care enough about the GPLv3 to look for a less burdensome license if Linux were to be offered under the GPLv3 exclusively.
That's not to say there might not be other valid bases for that conclusion, though.
Really? Can you posit any other possible explanation for the non-consumer device exception to the anti-TiVoization clause?
Why? Do you expect that the v3 is the end of time for the GPL?
First, there is no "essentially" there, it would have to be a contract. Second, of course it would infringe on Freedom Zero. Whether that's "absurd" or not is subjective, of course, I wasn't arguing that it would be reasonable or desirable for the FSF to do, but that it would be necessary if they were serious about fighting TiVo-ization.
There is no reason that the "actual provider" of the GPL-software-containing modules in the scenario I propose has to be the copyright holder of the software, the only thing that is required is that (1) the modules they supply are not "locked down", and (2) they are incorporated by the recipient into a hardware product that verifies that is locked down. The key to circumventing the anti-TiVoization provision isn't that the software module vendor is the copyright holder of the GPL software contained in the module, it is that the hardware vendor that is buying the software module never does anything with the modules that would require a copyright license, and thus is never subject to the GPL.
Mostly, I think Office is a good enough tool for many jobs. Many, perhaps most, of those jobs have better narrowly-specialized (and, for the commercial alternatives, often far more expensive than Office, though in some cases there are good Free choices) tools available, but if you don't spend enough time on any one of the jobs, you are better off using a good-enough common tool rather than trying to learn and transition between the specialized tools for each.
(This is largely true of the whole idea of an "office suite" application, not really specific to MS Office.)
Er, no, its not. First of all, Microsoft Office is more than just Word which is available separately; the price of Word alone, or of non-commercial Office licenses, is substantially less than the cost of commercial Office licenses.
I'm not sure what you mean by "bundled versions"; in one sense, all Microsoft Office versions, as opposed to separate applications, are "bundled versions". But the "restrictions" on, say, Microsoft Office Home and Student are that it has a no-commercial-use license, and it doesn't include Access or Publisher or some other things that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are quite usable without. It also does include OneNote 2007, which only the really expensive commercial Office bundles do, and comes with a 5-seat license. For home users, it would seem eminently usable.
Almost everyone I know that uses Microsoft Office at home, whether 2003 or 2007, uses the Student and Teacher (2003) or Home and Student (2007) non-commercial 5-seat version.
Certainly, interface preferences are to a degree subjective and vary from person to person, but I don't think mind-reading is involved in using the Office 2007 interface.
If available parking is reduced, people are more likely to park in no parking zones (which is what the spots would be turned into, right?) and presumably the fines for that are higher than the fines for overstaying a meter, so its win-win (for Apple and the city government, not for people looking for legal parking spaces.)
I like both Python and Ruby, but is this really true, and if so, what is meant by "clean object orientation" such that Python's roots (i.e., Python pre-"new-style" classes) featured it?
A template is, essentially, a file containing a collection of styles that may also include pre-set formatting that is beyond the scope of styles (page formatting, etc.).
Please point to where I said that "all those companies" should switch to Office 2007, or that any company should switch to Office 2007 because I find it more intuitive.
Or are you just fond of arguing with your own imagination?